Indigenous Borderlands in Colonial and 19th-Century Latin America

The expression “Indigenous borderlands” refers to those spaces of vague and porous contours where independent or semiautonomous Natives remained key historical agents after contact with people of European descent, interethnic exchanges were common, and no polity or community could exert full domination. Even though most Amerindian societies ended up displaced, exterminated, or incorporated into modern states, scores of Natives adapted to the European intrusion in ways that allowed them to preserve their independence, their sovereignty, their land, and their culture for prolonged periods, thus giving rise to Indigenous borderlands across the Western Hemisphere. In Indigenous borderlands, Natives successfully resisted European conquest and colonization, at least initially, as the newcomers failed to subjugate and acculturate them. Europeans brought deadly epidemics, environmental changes, and unprecedented competition over resources, labor demands, and warfare. Natives often responded through increased mobility, migration, military resistance, alliance, and selective incorporation of Old World species, technologies, and ideas. These strategies permitted some Indigenous groups to retain, at least partly, their distinct identity and their sovereignty into the nineteenth century and beyond, often through processes of hybridity and ethnogenesis. Even though few historians explicitly acknowledge the notion of Indigenous borderlands, the scholarship on Native agency, resilience, and power in contested regions of colonial and 19th-century Latin America has grown considerably in the last decades. This article includes a selection of works singled out for centering Natives and/or emphasizing Indigenous agency in long-lasting borderlands. Mesoamerica and the Andes have been left out to focus on other regions where Natives retained their independence and sovereignty longer, and on which the literature is less extensive. The unequal coverage of regions and Indigenous groups largely reflects the existing scholarship and the preference generally given to English-language and more recent works.